Preface

Summary

Today the name “Franz Liszt” (1811-1886) is even more often associated with Hungary than it was a century ago, and it remains associated with France, where Liszt lived from 1824-1835, and with Germany, where he lived from 1848-1861 and intermittently until the end of his rather long life. England isn't so frequently thought of as a “Liszt place,” but it was one—and continues to be one even today. Liszt paid repeated visits to the British Isles during the mid-1820s and the early 1840s, and in 1886 he returned for a final visit shortly before his death. Performers of his music and advocates of his compositional and pedagogical legacy kept the Liszt banner flying throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well.

In 1974-1975, when I lived and worked in Bonn with support from the German Academic Exchange Service (the “DAAD,” or Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst), I read a lot about Liszt but little about his English sojourns. Only in 1980 did an article appear devoted entirely to one of Liszt's visits to London: Adrian Williams's collection of reports concerning the composer's 1886 London activities. From the early 1980s until the present day, however, the name most often associated with investigations into Liszt's English and Scottish activities is that of William (“Bill”) Wright. I reported on his earliest publications in my own contributions to Acta Musicologica, and I have summarized most—but, as this is written, by no means all—of his subsequent studies. I remain amazed at Bill's enthusiasm for digging up Lisztiana in places most of us would never have thought to look: Cheetwood, for instance, and “Adampol,” an Asian forest enclave for exiled Polish soldiers. In this last settlement and the neighboring “farm of the Lazarist monks,” Bill managed what most of us considered an impossible task: learning anything more of substance about Liszt's only visit to Istanbul. This visit, still shrouded in mystery, is now a bit better understood, thanks to Bill's interest in Irish travel journals, English diaries, and private papers.

For specialists, perhaps, Bill Wright's contributions to Liszt studies are not obscure. But they aren't always readily available either. The Liszt Society Journal (hereafter “LSJ”), published in Great Britain since 1975, has hosted many of them, the Journal of the American Liszt Society (hereafter “JALS”) has hosted others.